Web Performance Resources and Optimization Tools

Engineers should always care about performance. Users certainly care about speed and there are manystudies that show a clear correlation between website performance and business metrics. Speed is a fundamental component of user experience and it affects everything from bounce rates to SEO and all the way down to conversion and revenue. How is your website doing in terms of page speed?

Google has been doing a lot lately to make the web faster. I really like Steve Souders approach and focus on FEO, or front end optimization, as it seems to be the biggest performance bottleneck for modern websites. Steve also created the HTTPArchive which crawls and collects hundreds of thousands of popular websites on the internet and provides interesting trends. This data is open source and you can even run queries on the dataset online via Google BigQuery. BigQueri.es is a great collection of some of these queries which can give great insight into the current aggregate outlook on how websites are built. Many of these come from Ilya Grigorik who also covers some really great information about network latency and optimization on his blog.

Trends show that websites are continuing to add on more imagery, stylesheets, and JavaScript to the page and performance is still a very important factor so I wanted to dedicate a post to aggregating the most important articles, slides, presentations, tools, and resources on performance analysis, benchmarking, monitoring, and optimization:

Thanks for the great collection. I just wanted to add another performance testing tool. I find MaxCDN Tools – http://tools.maxcdn.com/ very useful since it allows you compare performance for two domains. It is great for testing different environments or seeing how your site does against a competitor.